Best Practices for Implementing FAIR Vocabularies and Ontologies on the Web
This work helps researchers in domains like Biology and Geosciences by offering incremental improvements to ontology implementation practices.
The paper addresses the difficulty researchers face in finding, accessing, and understanding ontologies due to issues like poor documentation and URI problems, by providing guidelines and best practices for creating accessible and reusable ontologies on the Web, illustrated with concrete examples.
With the adoption of Semantic Web technologies, an increasing number of vocabularies and ontologies have been developed in different domains, ranging from Biology to Agronomy or Geosciences. However, many of these ontologies are still difficult to find, access and understand by researchers due to a lack of documentation, URI resolving issues, versioning problems, etc. In this chapter we describe guidelines and best practices for creating accessible, understandable and reusable ontologies on the Web, using standard practices and pointing to existing tools and frameworks developed by the Semantic Web community. We illustrate our guidelines with concrete examples, in order to help researchers implement these practices in their future vocabularies.